Day 16

The day dawns grey, overcast and raining. It’s not just drizzle, its rain, like pitter patter type rain, and it’s only 4⁰C.
The people across the street, whose house we look into, are watching TV at 7.00AM, and eating breakfast, I guess.
We head down to breakfast. Today its pancakes, rather cold and crisp about the edges. The coffee is cold too, helped though by nuking in the microwave.
We face the day, it’s now not raining so much, in fact not very much at all. We risk it as neither of us have any real rain gear.
For a Monday the city is surprisingly quiet, even though we are heading up town. There is snow in the Rue St Jean. What snow!! Turns out its only scrapings off the local ice skating rink, left on the side of the road.
The weather turns for the worse so we retreat into every shop we can find. There are no awnings here, the streets too narrow to have them I guess. That’s one of the things we noted about England, Wales and Scotland, very few of the shops have awnings.
At this time of the morning, about 9.00AM there is very little open.
10.00AM seems to be the common time.
Eventually get an umbrella, but by that time the rain has stopped. It does sit neatly in the side of my pack though.
We head out past the Wesleyan Church, the oldest place of worship for Protestants in Quebec, or so it claims.
Then to Musee de Fort, which is closed, we are too early, so we hit Petit Champlain, which is as small pedestrian street that heads down to the river side, full of shops, knick knack shops etc. I should say knick crap shops as much is pretty tacky.
We bob in and out of then as the weather is bad again, the umbrella makes an appearance and is then hogging the limelight for much of the day.
In one shop the lady offers to take it and put it in an umbrella stand. I think she fears for her stock. Turns out she has a daughter living at the Gold Coast. Her Knick Knacks aren’t bad actually, though too expensive.
We wander around, find a nice place for a cup of coffee and unload all our change. Canada, like the US, still has 1 cent pieces. We are 3 cents short however he is so pleased to have some extra change we get a discount.
By now the streets are full of Japanese and Americans off the two cruise ships that are at dock. We get accused of being “off the boat”.
The walking tour I had planned is now way off course, in fact we are lost.
Well in Quebec that is almost impossible. The Chateau Frontenac is so dominant that it is a very quick reference point.
By this time we down at St Laurence River level and seem to be in the classy shops and antique shop area. Way out of our class, however some very interesting pieces for sale. There doesn’t seem to be a problem here with furs.
You can just about buy anything with fur, except a beaver.
Looks like you can buy all sorts of animal heads too, if you can pay the price.
They have small produce market here which we check out. Quite a variety of vegetables. Huge sacks of potatoes and carrots for $6.00. Still no match for our Central Markets.
We head back towards the Auberge, and drop into a Le Cafe Boullangerie a bakery with a fine variety of French style bread etc. It gets us out of the rain, and a rather nice meal to boot. I have turkey BLT on a Panini which is particularly nice. Sue opts for a salad that has lettuce, grapes, blue cheese, sherry shallot vinaigrette, toasted pistachios and dried cranberries. All rather exotic.
We buy a couple of Grissini seeded loaves that prompt the comment “Is that a Grissini or are you just pleased to see me” and that should give you an idea of their shape.
They are delicious with a glass of red. They only thing missing is some olive oil and Duka.
We’ve come full circle and are almost back at the hostel, so we drop in and as it’s only 1.30 head out again.
There’s a maple syrup place we want to see and then there’s the Musee du Fort we missed earlier in the day.
The maple syrup place is a shop that totes itself as a museum, but really wants to see you stuff that uses maple syrup. It has some interpretive stuff upstairs about maple syrup, and is quite interesting. Goes through the process of collecting it, distilling the maple sap to end up with the concentrated syrup. It is harvested a bit like rubber, hacking into the bark of the tree and collecting the sap. They now bore holes in the tree, plug in a tube, connect a whole lot of tubes together, apply a vacuum, rather than just wait for the tree to do the work. Then we had the tasting. It’s rather nice stuff, best for pancakes I think.
We buy some maple syrup butter and head out to the Musee.
It starts to pelt down and very soon our legs are rather saturated, the umbrella does the inversion thing with the wind a number of times so we find refuge in a small alley where some artists are set up, with awnings. We are bedraggled however out of the rain and better still, the Musee is just around the corner 50 metres away.
The Musee du Fort has a small exhibition and a diorama with a light and sound show that depicts the 6 battles that have taken place at Quebec.
The model looks a little tacky with small houses, small tin soldiers and the geography and town laid out with sailing ships on the river.
When it gets going with the lights dimmed it is really very good. It shows how Quebec was involved in 6 battles over its lifetime and how the battles went. Various parts of the diorama lit up appropriate t the story, the guns fired, smoke came from their barrels, all in all the battles weren’t that good for the various commanders. In the battle in which the English captured Quebec, both Wolfe and the French commander died. When the US tried to capture Quebec around the war of independence one US commander died and the other was shot in the leg and lost the battle overall.
Unbeknownst to us we had chanced on the English presentation. If we had missed that the next one was in French and that wouldn’t have been pretty. “You dirty eenglishman, we hef our own grell” (in a thick French accent) a poor misquote from “The Holy Grail”.
The rains had eased so we scuttled back to the hostel.
I think we’ll hang about here for a while and wait and see what happens.
Well nothing much does so about 6 we head off for tea. Pause at one restaurant down the street and look at the menu. Another couple do the same. The women comments “too many words” and they move on.
So do we.
We end up back at the same restaurant we had tea on our arrival.
They are not quite as busy as Saturday night.
My pasta arrives and the waiter asks if I would like big pepper. He turns up with the BIGGEST pepper grinder I have seen. It must be 4 feet long. Again it reminds me of “Is that a pepper grinder in your pocket.....”
Well that’s Quebec for you.